One more demonstration that conservatives in the USA are losing their marbles

[fpb]

The opening sentence - the opening sentence, mind you - of today's Dennis Prager column:

One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn."

The man evidently knows no foreign language, and, what is more, does not expect any of his readers to. Incidentally, whatever he was paid for this column was not money well earned.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Well, at least is not quite as bad as a certain someone asserting "The French have no word for entrepreneur" ...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that someone was not paid for his words, and would probably have been the first to admit that he was not very clever with them. (That is probably why he does not seem to have had any notion of what "torture" and "cruel and unusual punishment" amount to.)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Well, at least is not quite as bad as a certain someone asserting "The French have no word for entrepreneur" ...

Well, we took the word and then they didn't have it any more! ;-)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Which is why such businesses as Carrefour, Peugeot, or Credit Lyonnais are not enterprises, and France is not one of the world's top ten economies.

Oh, that is sarcasm, by the way.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

o_O

It's ganar in Spanish.

[filialucis]

This is more than militant monolingualism. It's wilful idiocy.(I just googled to find the column, and if he can seriously suggest that German verdienen can't support the same sense of "earn" that he's driving at here, then the poor man has failed quite miserably at getting his mind round the concept of polysemy.

But then, to judge from his words he's also never heard the phrase "You've earned it" to mean "You deserve it". One wonders how much exposure he's had to his own native language, let alone anyone else's.

Edit: Incidentally, I didn't read beyond the first screen of his piece. I can't spare the time as I have money to deserve... er... earn. :)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am sure you deserve it, too.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee. Ha!

I thought the reason for the ascendance of the English-speaking world was English empire-building. English is not a particularly good language, in terms of being easy to learn and easy to speak.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, funny how three centuries of guns, gunships and gold seem less important to Mr Prager than the existence of an expression he deems untranslatable.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

I often hear things along this line - I guess it's folk-knowledge. you know, the small island tribe that "has no word for war!" First of all, the Sapir-Worf hypothesis has been pretty much disproven, so the lack of a specific word does not mean that the concept doesn't exist.

Actually, I don't really need to make any other points.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking, a language which "doesn't have the word for" something that exists in the society that speaks it uses a short phrase to describe that something. Eventually, that short phrase becomes a word.

Ne c'est pas? Or, today, just "pas?"

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Not always.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Not always.

It takes time. Did you know that "always" was one of those compounds? Germanic languages, like English, tend to compound with especial speed and enthusiasm.

Incidentally, French tends to do it more by slurring and elision. Both ways work ok, provided that the listeners know what the speakers mean. English just makes it easier to trace the linguistic history of the word's development.

For an English example of both, try "goodbye." That's "God be with you," both compounded and extensively elided and slurred.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there's always gonna be more concepts than words in use. Certainly not the other way around. Also, I wish I knew more about French! It's the one language I really can't get the hang of.

More examples of Germanic-style compounds: nevertheless, another, bedroom, homeschool

Example of French-style compounds: howdy!

You often get borrowed words from other languages (deja vu) and coined words that use common suffixes or prefixes, like blogosphere or snarktastic

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Prager's not worth his salary. Or his compensation.

[fishlivejournal.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Your point would be beyond him of course.

[annie-from-aust.livejournal.com]

the man is a twit !!!

Way Way Way Off Topic

[saturndevouring.livejournal.com]

And I apologize, but you're the only historian I know.

You mentioned previously the "Christ myth" theory and was wondering if you had any books to suggest that aren't too scholarly but not short on scholarship?

Thanks.

Re: Way Way Way Off Topic

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Could you be a bit more specific?

Re: Way Way Way Off Topic

[saturndevouring.livejournal.com]

Sorry. In rereading my post, I see that in attempting brevity I was actually oblique.

Basically, my cousin, an intelligent sort, has just seen Bill Maher's film 'Religulous' and is insisting that Jesus never existed even as an historical figure.

While I'm somewhat familiar with the subject matter (I've read the first volume of John Meier's 'A Marginal Jew'), I'm better educated in devotional books on the subject (like Endo's 'A Life Of Jesus'), and I'm looking for a book that offers a concise summation of the historical evidence for Jesus' existence with a background about the context and culture from which it arose.

He's the type who insists that because Jesus didn't write things down, he clearly didn't think much of what he had to say.

I don't think he'd be willing to read something like Meier's book, and was wondering, as I remember you posting about Jesus as an historical figure before (at least I think so), if you had a volume worth recommending for someone without an historian's background.

Thanks.

Re: Way Way Way Off Topic

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is absolutely fucking pathetic and shows no understanding whatever of the discipline of history.

It is midnight in Britain now, and I am going to sleep. So I have no time to answer this as it needs. I will do my best to write an essay on the historicity of Jesus myself, and point you to further sources. Tell your cousins that dimwit movies by ignorant Hollywood types are not worth their weight in excrement as evidence. Would he trust their account of, say, some World War Two episode? Would he Hell, and he would be right.

Re: Way Way Way Off Topic

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is still of any use to you, but I failed to give a proper answer when I should have, and I apologize. I pretty much left you to deal with this deluded person on your own.

So. From the viewpoint of the ordinary historian, to have to argue that Jesus existed is rather like having to argue that Napoleon existed. The evidence for the life of Jesus is as good as that for most known figures of his time, better than that for many. (For instance, the life of the famous "five good Emperors", Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Augustine and Marcus Aurelius, is known mostly through poor and unreliable sources.) But if I had to produce an argument, I would say this: that if Jesus had been invented, he had been invented with the witting collaboration of large strata of educated Roman opinion and of the Roman State, and within a decade or two of his "supposed" life and death.

To begin with, there is the evidence of the Gospels themselves. In the nineteenth century, there was a concerted effort - mainly from drifting Protestant academics and French liberals - to demonstrate that the New Testament was written no earlier than the second century, and thus had no historical value as a contemporary record. This desperate attempt, always improbable in view of the testimonies of Papias, Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, broke down completely when papyrus fragments proving the earlier existence of the Gospel of John were discovered, and twice over upon the evidence of the archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, proved beyond reasonable doubt that the author of Luke and Acts had lived in the first century and could not have lived in any other, because his works are full of references to contemporary realities that often changed in a matter of years, and eyewitness descriptions of actual fact. After Ramsay, a series of similar discoveries were also made about John. Neither Luke nor John can possibly have written after about 90 AD, that is, outside living memory.

The historian G.W.Bowersock, in his important study Fiction as History, has since added an important consideration. He has given us strong reason to believe that the stories of the New Testament, including the Crucifixion, were widely known and an important cultural influence on later Roman literature. (Hence the title.) He traces this influence back and finds that it appears, suddenly and with no precedent, at the court of Nero in the work of Petronius Arbiter. Nero was the Emperor to whom Paul appealed against a death sentence.

There is a lot more to be said, but these few facts, alone, are enough to dispose of the superstition of the "unhistorical Christ" for anyone who has any respect for the craft of the historian. In fact, it was dead long before most of its supporters had had any opportunity to debate it. So why has it proved so enduring in some quarters? Well, apart from the obvious ideological appeal, there is the way that such people promoted each other and their doctrine to the newspapers. Every time their work was quoted, was in a cloud of admiration of their scholarly and personal integrity. You never hear mention of Loisy, to mention a prominent one, without high praise of his scholarship, integrity and progressive attitude, and of how wrong the Church was to condemn him; and yet, as a matter of pure and obvious fact, the Church was right and Loisy wrong. The counter-proof to his theories came up within his lifetime, and he refused either to debate or even to acknowledge them - so much for scholarship and integrity. They are pretty much all like that, except for Harnack and JAT Robinson, who changed their minds when faced with evidence.